Colloquium

Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series,
held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 pm in Shanahan B460. The talks are
open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by
scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series
features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.

Nick Hutzler, Caltech Searching for New Particles and Forces With Polyatomic Molecules

The fact that the universe is made entirely out of matter, and contains no free anti-matter, has no physical explanation. While we cannot currently say what process created the matter in the universe, we know that it must violate a number of fundamental symmetries, including those that forbid the existence of certain electromagnetic moments of fundamental particles. We can search ...

Supermassive black holes are in place by the first billion years of the universe's existence. Several promising channels have be proposed for their formation, but forming supermassive black holes in the requisite time-frame remains a theoretical puzzle. One promising channel is that of direct collapse, in which a cloud of gas collapses to a massive seed black hole that then ...

Short of sending a spacecraft, radar observations have proven to be the most effective technique to study Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and occasionally comets. The two most powerful radars in the world are the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Goldstone Solar System Radar in the Mojave Desert in California. To date, these radars have observed more than 700 NEAs ...

In this talk I will describe recent results on the modelling of interacting galaxies using the novel Feedback In Realistic Environment (FIRE) model. FIRE is capable of resolving the multi-phase structure of the interstellar medium (ISM). In this model, feedback from stars and supernovae regulate star formation. Studying mergers is particularly interesting because these extreme environment lead to intense burst ...

The physicists on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Clinic team (Emily Lane and Arch Robison) will describe their project, and the physicists on the Sandia National Laboratory Clinic team (Ále Baptista, Andrew Bishop, and Lupe MacIntosh) will describe theirs.